Bug 34686

Sometimes one just has to get used to slight differences in behaviour as software evolves. (If you want everything to stay the same, don't change anything, don't ever upgrade any software.) 

But I'll leave it to Kohei to tell if this is intentional, and what the rationale is, and whether there perhaps is any workaround. I very much doubt this is "critical" though...

Yes, this is 100% intentional.  You can hit ESC to get out of the paste mode.  As this is an essential part of LibreOffice Calc's internal, there is unfortunately no way to turn this off even as a configuration option (lots of other features depend on this one).

Thanks for the workaround - Escape - to be able to edit cells by without pasting into them.

Please consider an option to turn off Return for pasting. Copy mode is good (the highlight is a great feature) - but pasting with Return is dangerous.

I really hope you will consider changing this issue into an enhancement as it totally obstructs the workflow for some users (me and my colleagues). I haven't experienced this in Open Office or other spreadsheet programs.

It's suprisingly often that I work while having something important in the copy buffer and suddenly find out I've pasted it into a wrong cell since I edited a couple of cells before pasting. Really dangerous actually :(

Sorry.  Like I said, no.  And you can always Ctrl-Z to undo accidental pasting.

Well, maybe we should leave this open just in case.  But the chance of us working on making it configurable is pretty slim.  I'm just being honest about this.

Sure - I can't set this as an enhancement or suggestion, though.

Anyway thanks agian - Ctrl + Z don't work if you never realize what happened. It might be hard to distinguish the wrongly pasted cell from what was there before so often you might be in doubt or not discover it until later when somethings goes wrong (or the client reports a bug in the spreadsheet). That's what I meant be dangerous.

You mean, you can't tell if something is pasted or not at the current cursor position, even though the pasted data is highlighted?

Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe.

(In reply to comment #7)
> You mean, you can't tell if something is pasted or not at the current cursor
> position, even though the pasted data is highlighted?

When I use Ctrl+V the "no-questions-asked pasted-into overwritten" cell gets nicely highlighted :) - it great and easy to see, yes.

However, when you press Return on a cell there's no indication that you pasted into it. No highlight. The content just change (which might be impossible to see if the formula is different but the result is the same).

(In reply to comment #8)

> However, when you press Return on a cell there's no indication that you pasted
> into it. No highlight. The content just change (which might be impossible to
> see if the formula is different but the result is the same).

Like I said, when I paste by hitting ENTER (or RETURN), it hightlights the pasted data.  I'm just not seeing what you are seeing.

That's odd... let's continue this in my new bug report:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35116


This issue is about a Return paste mode on/off option.

(In reply to comment #6)
> Ctrl + Z don't work if you never realize what happened.
> It might be hard to distinguish the wrongly pasted cell from what was there
> before so often you might be in doubt or not discover it until later when
> somethings goes wrong (or the client reports a bug in the spreadsheet). That's
> what I meant be dangerous.

I agree with this.  If you don't notice immediately upon pressing enter, and save and exit, all the Ctrl-Z in the world won't help you.

This bad behavior in Excel is why I use OpenOffice on the rare occasions that I need to use Windows, and is encouraging me to switch back to OO.o.  This breaks workflow in Calc.

Wow, the arrogance dripping from some of these comments here!

There are obviously some people who use Enter to edit cells! Otherwise we wouldn't have bug reports on it (this one and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39531 ).

@Tor Lillqvist
It is not a slight change for some users and it is not "a step forward in evolution". It is merely a copy of MS Excel's behavior.

@Kohei Yoshida
You stated that the new paste behavior is 100 % intentional. Would you mind to elaborate why it was introduced?
What is the difference for users between using Enter and Ctrl+v? If you use Ctrl+c to copy, then Ctrl+v is much easier to reach than Enter. If you use the mouse for copying, then the keyboard is irrelevant.
The "Enter to edit" behavior in Calc is present as "F2 to edit" in Excel, and it is inferior because Enter is close to Backspace and Delete, it is a bigger key than others and more difficult to miss than F2 (oh the joy from accidentally hitting F1).
You even copied the "Remove content from clipboard after paste" from Excel! Something that is driving me crazy in Excel, and one of the reasons I turned to Calc! And again, there is not reason for this behavior since we live in times of cheap RAM and, quite frankly, items in the clipboard are probably the smallest problem of LibreOffice's memory footprint.
Introducing the new behavior does not give us any usability enhancements! Instead, it destroys some people's work-flow!

I deeply respect everyone who contributes to LibreOffice and I deeply admire people who know how to program software. But we users are part of the package too! If you cannot introduce a change in behavior without adding an option to turn it off, then don't introduce it! We have "Enter to edit" as an option, please respect that. (And don't get any ideas and remove that option to force your view of what is right and wrong upon others.)
Peace! (And ... breathe.)

Btw., what other features of Calc depend on "Enter to paste"?

*** Bug 39531 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Dear All,

Sorry to reopen something that had turned into a bit of a flame war, but...

Here's a variant of this behaviour that I believe is _very_ unlikely to be intentional.  Steps to reproduce:

1. Highlight a set of cells.
2. Press ctrl-c to copy.
3. Select another cell.
4. Press ctrl-alt-c to add a comment.
5. In the comment field that pops up, type a passage of text.
6. Decide that, somewhere in the middle of that passage of text, there should be a line break.
7. Click at the appropriate location in the comment text.
8. Press enter, intending to add a line break.
9. Notice that, instead of adding a line break in the comment, pressing enter has pasted material in some cell or group of cells.
10. Notice further that the text you entered in the comment field at step 5 has disappeared (more precisely, has been overwritten by whatever comment or absence of comment was in the cell(s) you copied at step 2).
11. Decide you'd like to retrieve the text you typed at step 5.
12. Press ctrl-z to undo.
13. Notice that ctrl-z has failed to restore the comment text, which is apparently irreversibly lost.

As an aside, I note that this behaviour is not shared by Excel, which clears the clipboard at step 4.

Incidentally - since step 13 of the above involves irreversible data loss, is there a case to upgrade this bug from "enhancement" to "critical"?

It's been four days since I mooted the possibility of upgrading this to critical, due to the irreversible data loss.  No-one's raised any objections, so I'm doing it.

I just wanted to chime in to say that I would love to be able to turn this off. Hitting enter to paste is a very strange mechanic, and one that's hard to predict. Especially when there's an option explicitly saying that enter should edit the cell instead! Maybe it's copying an existing behaviour in excel, maybe some people expect it, but I don't think it's intuitive at all. I would love to see an option for disabling it.

So a couple notes on this:
1. It's not a critical bug, please don't set your pet bugs to critical - we have a system that works.
2. Removing the whiteboard status as I have no clue what that means - we have a list of whiteboard status' that are used, that is not one of them.
3. Setting to UNCONFIRMED as it doesn't look like anyone ever confirmed this and REOPENED is not the correct status regardless

If you're interested in learning more, please join the QA team. Thanks

This is a fine enhancement request but as Kohei has said - very unlikely that a volunteer will ever tackle it. Marking as NEW as the bar for enhancements is quite low.